Ragging: Whose responsibility is it?

It is the most politically incorrect thing to say now but I am not one of those rare breed of people who can take the high moral ground on ragging.

I am not proud of it, it was quite silly what we did on that one day in but nobody ever lost their heads during the session. Isn’t the flurry of shocking incidents of ragging a sign of our growing insensitivity as a society? It is not that the court’s concern was misplaced or that action does not need to be taken against perpetrators but merely that owning up has to precede fault-finding. It is true that the legal framework is yet to be in place but the real problem starts from us.

And if the problem lies with the make-up of the society we live in then its solution can hardly come from the weeding out of the manifestations of that problem and not treating its cause. A school, which has been the home of its students for a number of years, can barely escape responsibility for their conduct by simple asking them to leave.

I am not saying this out of any sympathy for the seven boys rusticated from Sanawar but out of sheer concern that the violent trait that they displayed in their behaviour to their juniors would inevitably get manifested elsewhere unless treated professionally.

It was facile for the school to give in to the “eye for an eye’’ cry that would naturally have risen from parents of junior students who suffered in the hands of these boys – they had undergone ear damage and the parents’ ire is every bit justified – and also to escape the FIR that the parents had threatened to lodge against the school. But what next?

A school is not a court that tries and punishes the guilty, it educates, is responsible for the overall intellectual and emotional maturity of its students and is also a place which gives its students human values – a residential school even more so.

If a school has failed to create sensitive human beings out of its class XII students, what was the purpose of the education it imparted and is it not time for it to do some introspection rather than wash its hands off the incident completely by asking the guilty to simply not return to school?

Lighting candles and writing placards is just the beginning. We need to take responsibility as a society, and as individuals. That possibly is the only way we can prevent another Amann Kachroo from being lost.

Author

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is assistant editor, metro, at The Times Of India, Delhi. The blog is just about our life and times, about being a thirtysomething living in these times when economically and socially every day we are redefining our existence, finding new meanings to old idioms and after all that find ourselves at times mouthing the same old prejudices that we abhor in the older generation. Getting old ?eh!

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is ass. . .

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Author

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is assistant editor, metro, at The Times Of India, Delhi. The blog is just about our life and times, about being a thirtysomething living in these times when economically and socially every day we are redefining our existence, finding new meanings to old idioms and after all that find ourselves at times mouthing the same old prejudices that we abhor in the older generation. Getting old ?eh!

Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is ass. . .